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Technology Stocks : Lucent Technologies (LU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sawtooth who wrote (19022)	2/23/2002 6:44:35 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21876

INTERVIEW-Lucent says strong on its own, no gap in portfolio industryclick.com INTERVIEW-Lucent says strong on its own, no gap in portfolio Reuters, Feb 22 2002 CANNES, France, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Telecoms equipment company Lucent Technologies said on Thursday it was strong enough to stand on its own feet, almost a year after a merger with French rival Alcatel was called off. The U.S. company also said it expected the telecoms market to shrink by as much as 20 percent in 2002 year-on-year while the mobile networks market would be flat. Lucent, a major telecoms equipment supplier, also said it expected to grow this year. "We have gone through a significant restructuring," Scott Erickson, senior vice president of Lucent's mobile sales and marketing segment, told Reuters in an interview. "We are in a pretty good shape now. Financials are in place so I think we are ok," he said when asked if the firm was still looking for a partner. Erickson, attending Europe's biggest mobile phone trade show in the French Riviera city of Cannes, said that the company's portfolio of products was now complete, indicating that Lucent did not need a partner. "There is no need for anything. No gaps in our portfolio," he said. Lucent has been slashing its workforce, selling plants, discontinuing money-losing products and selling non-core businesses in an effort to remake itself as a smaller supplier more focused on the largest telephone companies. LUCENT SEES FLAT WIRELESS MARKET Erickson backed 2002 forecasts for the mobile networks market given by Finnish rival Nokia. Ericsson, the Swedish mobile networks maker, expects the market to shrink by as much as 10 percent this year. "On the mobile (networks) side we see it flat. Not negative. Our own growth will definitely not be negative, because we are so strong in CDMA2000," he said. "For us the CDMA market is booming right now." CDMA (code division multiple access) is a standard popular in the United States, South Korea and Japan and it competes with the more widely used GSM (global system for mobile communication) standard, strong in Europe. CDMA2000, a standard promoted by U.S. group Qualcomm, is fighting for a slice of the next generation of mobile networks, where the rival standard WCDMA, also called UMTS, is number one. Lucent is promoting both CDMA2000 and WCDMA and wants to be a leading supplier of equipment working on both standards. It plans to set up a WCDMA test network for Spanish operator Telefonica in Spain in mid-2002. Erickson said he hoped this would show operators Lucent's potential in high-speed WCDMA networks. Erickson was downbeat about the whole telecommunications sector this year. "The telecoms sector in general will be down 15 percent of maybe five percent on top of that (in 2002)," he said. On Wednesday the company reiterated it expected second quarter sales growth of 10 percent to 15 percent above the first quarter. That would mean Lucent would post revenues of between $3.8 and $4 billion. ^ REUTERS@